1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of telecommunications applications, and more particularly to the field of call recording applications for use in contact centers and law enforcement.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
Recording communications is a very important part of contact center operations and of law enforcement, for obviously different reasons. Moreover, communication monitoring, for example where a quality assurance monitors telephone calls in a contact center to ensure quality of customer service, is also common and uses much the same technical approach as that used in communication recording. In both contact center and law enforcement usage, it is often desirable for at least one of the parties in a communication to have his communication recorded or monitored without his knowledge (or indeed often without his consent). In the art, this condition is often satisfied in cases where communications are delivered using “plain old telephone service” (POTS) in which dedicated circuits used for calls are easily monitored using a variety of tapping devices (hence the term “wiretapping”), the monitoring being undetectable by the persons being monitored or recorded.
In the case of more modern, packet-based communications channels (for example, internet protocol telephony), it is often much more difficult to record or monitor communication between one or more parties without the knowledge of the parties involved, particularly if the parties are technically knowledgeable about data networks. Moreover, in many cases it is difficult to arrange for packet-based telephony call monitoring in the same manner as is used by circuit-based (POTS) systems, as it is often impossible to know in advance exactly what data path will be followed by packets corresponding to any given call. In some cases this is facilitated by so-called “SIP trunking”, which uses an architecture very similar to POTS, with each SIP call going through one of a plurality of circuit-like SIP trunks, but this is not always the approach taken in delivering IP telephony calls to contact centers, and it is also rarely the case that calls to be monitored or recorded by law enforcement agencies will be easily tapped using SIP trunks.
What is needed in the art is a method for passively monitoring or recording IP communications in a way that is undetectable by one or more of the parties being monitored.